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SitePoint Marketplace Reports Record Sell-Through Rate

Josh Catone
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Who says the Zune isn’t worth anything? Earlier this month 15-year-old Hansup Yoon cashed out by selling his Zune-centric community web site, aptly called ZuneBoards, to the tune of $62,000 on SitePoint’s Marketplace. Yoon, who lives in Fullerton, California, started his site just under 2 years ago and grew it to 60,000 members and more than 270,000 posts. ZuneBoards was bringing in about $1,000 per month from AdSense and Tribal Fusion ads when he put it up for sale on SitePoint.

Why did Yoon choose SitePoint Marketplace to sell his site? Over the past couple of years, SitePoint has become one of the premier places to buy and sell web sites on the Internet. We saw an example of that this morning, when less than 24 hours after being featured on TechCrunch, another top tech blog CenterNetworks reported that JustHackIt was up for sale on SitePoint. That sort of exposure is leading to record growth in listings, bids, and the all important sell-through rate.

The Marketplace recorded a record number of listings and bids in July, up 12% and 26% respectively month-to-month from June, SitePoint’s co-founder Matt Mickiewicz told me. Traffic to the Marketplace was also up month-to-month. That’s fairly impressive growth considering that it is currently summer in the United States.

While that’s great news for SitePoint, it also proved to be great news for sellers. 46% of auctions closed in July with a winner declared — 10% more than in June and a new monthly record. That means nearly 1 out of every 2 listings on SitePoint Marketplace ended with a sale (assuming that most winning bids were followed up on successfully).

A 46% sell through rate is in line with those of eBay’s glory years. As we reported yesterday, though, eBay is shifting away from auctions in favor of fixed-price sales, which are not as attractive to many people selling web sites.

Yoon said that he decided to sell ZuneBoards to put more time into his studies (he’ll be a sophomore in high school this year), and also that he thought he didn’t have the time or knowledge to grow the site to its full potential. Anecdotally, that’s a popular reason cited for why people sell sites on SitePoint.

The Orange County Register has a great profile of Yoon up on their blog.